Sarah Jensen

Thesis

Research

My research focuses on cultures of memorialization in England during the long eighteenth century. Cultures of memorialization are the ways in which cultures approached death and were structured according to a community’s social memory. In other words, these cultural traditions and values where forged on what society choose to remember, and what it choose to forget. I incorporate Barbara Rosenwein's theory of emotional communities with Pierre Nora's research on history and memory to approach funeral monuments and ghost narratives as "sites of memory" and "constructed memory symbols". My thesis explores the ways emotional communities constructed notions of self and belonging through these memory material objects. I focus mostly on how the memory used to structure memorialization materials came from a specific social group—urban middling and upper class experiences. My thesis looks at how these material objects were appropriated by future generations to forge their own perception of the past to makes sense of their present.